The last twosummers, we’ve counted down the 20 biggest douchebags in baseball.

This year, that great American tradition comes to an end. To be honest, it was a little beneath us. Although I tried to keep the list from becoming a clearinghouse for personal vendettas (otherwise, 17 of the 20 players would have been Red Sox), it was still essentially a list of people I don’t like. So this year, we’re changing gears and only naming the single biggest douchebag in all of baseball:

Bryce Fucking Harper

And holy shit do I love him.

In placing at number 15 on last year’s countdown, Harper impressed with his douchebaggery before he ever caught whiff of a big league at bat. I wrote:

Oh, yes. Fresh, douchey blood. I couldn’t be more giddy with anticipation for Harper’s arrival in the big leagues. Just this year alone, he blew a kiss at a pitcher while closing out an interminable home run trot…

Harper is without a doubt the biggest douchebag around, and that’s precisely why I can’t get enough of him. His streak of jackassery combines with his enormous ego and his outsized talent to create the most compulsively watchable player in baseball. He has the most must-watch at bats since Barry Bonds in 2002 (before we were all sick of him).

Baseball is typically considered a staid, polite game, but there’s nothing inherent in the nature of the sport that demands it be so. Baseball players, managers, and fans tend to respect history and tradition to a fault, resulting in a strange adherence to unwritten rules about showing the other team up. Now, I’m not advocating for a return to the spikes-up play of the racist 1910s, but baseball can definitely use an infusion of personality.

On one side of that coin, we have R.A. Dickey, an eminently likable player and a seemingly great, intelligent guy — who has become one of the two best stories of the season. On the other, we have Bryce Harper — as hatable as Dickey is likable, and seemingly a dummy and an asshole. They’re both exactly what baseball needs, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off either one.

Harper has no interest in paying his dues or waiting an appropriate amount of time to cash in on his prodigious talent. He thinks he’s the best player in the game (he’s not…yet) and he carries himself as such on and off the field. And he plays the game with a violence that’s apparent in the way he swings, fields, throws and behaves. That aggression translates directly to charisma — even if it’s the charisma of an unlikable prick.